Emotion Recognition and Eye-Tracking Data for Masked and Unmasked Faces in Children

81 children (36 three-year-olds and 45 five-year-olds) participated in an eye-tracking study on emotion recognition. The dataset contains measurements of recognition accuracy and fixation duration for four emotions (joy, sadness, anger, fear) under masked and unmasked conditions. The research was conducted by Jeongeun Lee and published in 2026.

Use Cases

• Analyze the effect of mask-wearing on emotion recognition accuracy across the four emotion types.
• Compare gaze fixation duration patterns between masked and unmasked facial conditions.
• Model age-related differences in emotion recognition accuracy between three-year-old and five-year-old cohorts.
• Investigate the relationship between visual attention to the eye region and overall recognition accuracy under masked conditions.

Strengths

• Includes data from 81 participants, a notable sample for a controlled developmental study.
• Captures four distinct emotion types (joy, sadness, anger, fear) in two presentation conditions.
• Uses objective eye-tracking technology to record fixation duration data.

Limitations

• The dataset is small in scale at 21.1 KB, likely containing summary results rather than raw trial-level data.
• Limited to two specific age groups (three- and five-year-olds), restricting generalizability to other developmental stages.
• Geographic and demographic context of the participants is unknown, which may limit external validity.

Provenance

Source

Jeongeun Lee via figshare.

Collection Method

Data collected via controlled eye-tracking experiment where children viewed facial expressions.

Time Range

Study conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, specific collection dates unknown.

Freshness

Last updated in March 2026, indicating recent research.